In-depth examination of the role of remote sensing in the geosciences; hands-on experience processing exemplary remote sensing data in GIS; guided and independent performance of various data analyses.

With the Sentinel satellites of ESA's Copernicus program and new missions from NASA (e.g., Landsat 8 and 9), as well as the opening of archives of historical remote sensing data, a new era of Earth observation has begun. These opportunities are fostering new methods that harness multitemporal and multisensory data from the local to the global scale for a wide variety of environmental monitoring applications. These include terrestrial and marine ecosystems, the atmosphere, and climate change monitoring.

In this course, we address theoretically and practically the opportunities for the geosciences arising from these developments. Therefore, we discuss the current state of the art and future sensors and their applications in environmental research. More specifically, we consider the monitoring capabilities of key parameters of all geospheres and a wide range of remote sensing techniques, including multispectral, hyperspectral, thermal, and RADAR techniques. Ultimately, we aim to understand how this partial knowledge can be integrated into more holistic modeling approaches for the Earth system, supporting policy and decision making on environmental problems.

The course divided into the following blocks of topics: I. Fundamentals, II. remote sensing of land surface, III. urban remote sensing, IV. remote sensing of oceans, V. remote sensing of the atmosphere, VI. Integration

In each block, theoretical content on individual sensors and methods will be taught (as input and in the form of presentations) as well as practical example analyses using GIS. Mainly open source software is used, which will be available later in professional life.

will be announced in the Moodle course